Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Trespass!

So in the law there's this thing called trespass. It doesn't really have anything to do with going on other people's land to get your baseball. It's about doing bad things. And there are all sorts of trespass, all differentiated by little Latin phrases stuck after the word "trespass." And so we have "trespass quare clausum fregit" and "trespass de bonis asportatis" which are all well and good. And if you go to dictionary.com and enter in the word "trespass," you'll see, at the bottom of the page, entries from Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of the Law which list out all these fuckers. And it also lists one interesting-sounding trespass, that is "trespass intransitive verb et armis."

This is a mistake, because "intransitive verb" is not Latin for anything. The phrase that they intend to list here is "trespass vi et armis" which is trespass with force and arms, but the "vi" somehow got translated into "intransitive verb."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Mattie! You need more comments! Law school is the worst. I'm glad that you have a sense of humor about it.